Karolina Jabłońska Rotten Apples, 2026

This intimately-scaled work by Karolina Jabłońska, executed in oil on wood, depicts a glass jar filled with green apples. The work continues Jabłońska's engagement with the glass preserving jar, known in Poland as “słoiki,” here filled not with produce but with fragments of the human body. These jars become transparent containers of memory: of survival, of foresight, and of largely invisible female labor. The recurring head, modeled on the artist's own features, has become a readily available image within her vocabulary. The support is a small wooden panel, primed and polished by the artist herself. As the artist has put it, “the paintings come from small sensory and emotional impressions.” Yet the personal is also political: inherent in these works are references to the role of women, the existential threat to their bodies, and restrictions imposed by political realities.